love poem

Long ago, in the young moonlight,
I lost my heart to a hero;
Strong and tender and stern and right,
Darker than night,
And terribler than Nero.
Heigh, but he was dear, O!

And there, to bind our fellowship,
I laughed at him; and a moment after.
I laughed again till he bit his lip,
For the test of love is laughter.

“Lord and master, look up!” I cried;
“I wreathe your brow with a laurel!
Gloom and wisdom and right and pride
Cast them aside,
And kiss, and cure our quarrel.

“To look on happiness through others' eyes,”
So mused I, not without a secret pain,
For lovers passed me in the twilight lane,
As arm in arm they murmured soft replies.
How sweetly Love can gild the winsome lies
Whispered in Youth! But oh! to us in vain
He calls, if in our heart that barb remain,—
“To look on happiness through others' eyes.”
Joy is a jewel-casket locked to Age,
Youth and Love only have the golden key;
Bliss is a bubble, bursting as it flies:
Now evening comes, and what is left to me?

They say there is
A still pool even in the middle of
The rushing whirlpool,—
Why is there none in the whirlpool of my love?

My heart is happy now, beloved,
Albeit thy form is far away;
A joy that will not be removed
Broods on me like a summer's day.
Whatever evil Fate may do,
It cannot change what has been thine;
It cannot cast those words anew,
The gentle words I think divine.

No touch of time can blight the glance
That blest with early hope my love;
New years are dark with fearful chance,
That moment is with God above:
And never more from me departs
Of that sweet time the influence rare,
When first we looked into our hearts

A Friend there is—your voices join,
Ye saints, to praise his name!—
Whose truth and kindness are divine,
Whose love's a constant flame.

When most we need his helping hand,
This friend is always near;
With heav'n and earth at his command,
He waits to answer prayer.

His love no end or measure knows,
No change can turn its course;
Immutably the same it flows
From one eternal source.

When frowns appear to veil his face,
And clouds surround his throne,
He hides the purpose of his grace,

The moonlight is a silver sea
Where shadow-ships at anchor ride,
And on the wind there seems to be
A rhythmic murmur, far and wide,
As if the heaving Ocean still
Raised toward his white love in the sky
A following tide of dreams, that fill
The slumbering forest with their sigh.

All quiet lie the shadow-ships
Athwart the silver sea of night;
Its waveless flood around them slips,
A star their only riding light.
As if, where all alone she rides,
The Moon recalled her love, the Sea;

Every day I muse upon thee:
Life and joy thou art to me.
If a faithful heart could win thee,
Soon my own love thou wouldst be.
Ah, how sweet to dwell with thee!

Swift my years would glide away;
All around would laugh with pleasure;
Rich would be the priceless treasure.
Art could find no words to say,
How my bounding thoughts would play.

Let me then be ever nigh thee.
Youth shall be our spring of love;
Mild as any mother dove,
Age shall sit in quiet by thee.
Never may misfortune try thee.

A SUFFERING soul in sorrow's vale
Now pleads for sympathy:
“‘Could ye not watch with me one hour’
In my Gethsemane?

My neighbor of the Happy Heights,
Could you not, lovingly,
Divide your happiness with me,
In my Gethsemane?

To every soul must come, some day,
Its meed of agony;
But blest will be the bountiful
In their Gethsemane.”

Other people too have friends that they love;
But ours was a love such as few friends have known
You were all my sustenance; it mattered more
To see you daily than to get my morning food
And if there was a single day when we did not meet
I would sit listless, my mind in a tangle of gloom
To think we are now thousands of miles apart,
Lost like clouds, each drifting on his far way!
Those clouds on high, where many winds blow,
What is their chance of ever meeting again?
And if in open heaven the beings of the air

If you can count the leaves of the trees,
Or the foaming waves of the untamed seas,
Then will I entrust to you alone
To reckon the amours I have known.
Take at Athens twenty mistresses,
And then you may add fifteen to these.
Put me a countless number down
At Corinth, that famed Achæan town,
Where the women are so dangerously fair
From falling in love one can't escape there.
My Lesbian I will now indite,
Next Ionian and Carian; and you may write
Many at Rhodes, all my heart's delight.
The sum when computed carefully